Opertoon

My name’s Erik Loyer. I’m a media artist, designer, and creator of interactive works, both fiction and non-fiction. I founded Opertoon in 2008 to combine elements of games, comics, and music into stories that you can play like instruments, or sing like the songs in a musical.

Why the fascination with musicals? Well, It’s not so much about loving the genre of the musical as it is loving the idea of the musical; the idea of telling stories with music and singing, in the broadest sense.

The musical is profoundly optimistic. It dares to suggest both that life is worth comparing to a song in the first place, and that you, without any more training than the process of living itself, might be able to sing along with the song you’re living in, with perfect pitch and rhythm, eloquently expressing exactly what’s going on for you, right here, right now.

In an Opertoon musical, your actions are the singing, and the world is the song—though not necessarily your song. One of my favorite things about interactive media is how code can translate your gestures, your “voice,” as it were, into the syllables of someone else’s song. It can offer you a crude sense of what it’s like to sing that song, and in doing so perhaps reveal some new insights about your own.

All of the stories you’ll find here are musicals, in one form or another. I hope you enjoy them.